Happy New Year

I’m back at work after a wonderful two-week vacation. That’s got to be the best part about working for a school district. Believe it or not, I rarely even touched a computer during those two weeks.

Now that 2008 is here, what should I do? Seth Godin says the first thing to do this year is Google yourself. Sounds good to me. This blog is now the 8th result for “Anthony Lewis”. The New York Times columnist and author will probably always outrank me. He’s now 80 years old, so I don’t think anyone will confuse the two of us.

ResolutionsGoals

I’m still working on formulating my goals for this year. It’s easy to spout off a few resolutions like “lose weight” and “get rich”, but I want to really focus on what I’m going to do this year. I’ve been reading some great posts on Zen Habits and Get Rich Slowly about setting goals for 2008. I’m trying to keep their lessons in mind as I plan out the next year.

One thing I’m not going to do is make a promise about posting to any of my blogs. I’ve done that several times in the past and it never works. NoBloPoMo was a complete failure for me.

Writing

I’ve been blogging off-and-on since 1999. I used to write all the time. I was generating so much content that I felt the need to split it up into multiple blogs. A funny thing happened after I did that. It seems like by defining what I was going to write about I took all of the freedom and fun out of the process. Within a few months I wasn’t writing anything.

Almost a year passed before I finally created this site to try to get back into writing. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I wanted this site to mainly be just for me. It wasn’t long before I fell into the same trap as before. I decided that the main focus of this site should be on web development.

By attempting to define what I was doing, I effectively shut down my creativity. Not only did I stop writing, I also stopped working on the projects that I was writing about. Not good.

Two weeks off was exactly what I needed to clear my head and prioritize things again. From now on, I’ll write whenever I feel like writing and post it wherever I want. If I happen to write something relevant to one of my other blogs I’ll post it there. Otherwise, it will end up here.